Skip to main content

New shirts use Michael Jackson and other celebs to fool Facebook’s facial recognition

Can you trick Facebook? More importantly, can Britney Spears help you trick Facebook? A graphic designer named Simone C. Niquille created an art project privacy advocates will love that tests the limitations of facial recognition software. She designed a series of shirts called “RealFace Glamoflage” specifically to help Internet users evade facial recognition technology all over the Internet. 

Many websites use facial recognition software, but Facebook’s decision to take advantage of the technology is important because it’s the most widely used social network, so the recognition database it is amassing will likely be more vast than any other. If you’re not comfortable with Facebook’s forays into facial recognition, the company’s decisions to buy facial recognition software Face.com and to change its terms of service to allow your profile pictures in auto-tagging tests may leave you cold. If the social network’s insistence on moving forward with facial recognition gives you the heebie-jeebies — but not enough to quit using it — Niquille’s t-shirt campaign may bring you closer to a solution.

Recommended Videos

Niquille sells shirts featuring prints of the faces of celebrity impersonators for Michael Jackson, Barack Obama, and Britney Spears — shirts specially designed to make facial recognition algorithms go berserk. Other shirts feature the faces of women culled from pop-up ads on Facebook. “I reverse Google Image searched their images to try and figure out how one might end  up as a face on a fake pop up ad,” Niquille explains. “I didn’t find the identities of those girls, instead multiple social media profiles, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr selfies with the same photo. Thus, those girls are as hard to identify as a celebrity lookalike, I’d argue.” 

The shirts haven’t been tested on Facebook because they were designed before the company stepped up its campaign to incorporate the technology, and Niquille doesn’t use the website. She initially had other facial recognition usage in mind when she developed the project “Picasa has an online automatic photo tagging service as well as iPhoto. Cameras have facial recognition to snap a photo when your smiling or to focus on your face, PayPal’s iPhone app let’s you pay with your face, or that’s a pilot, to mention only a few,” she says. 

But even though the designs haven’t been proven to definitively thwart Facebook, Niquille says they’ve beaten other systems. “Depending on the facial recognition technology, the shirts work more or less successfully. They aren’t designed to protect in any way but to confuse,” she says. “I have tested them on multiple facial recognition or detection devices I had access to and the success rate obviously varies from light, wearer and software.” 
 
Since the creator isn’t going to tests the concept on Facebook, looks like it’s up to the buyers to make sure these shirts work — and even if they don’t, they’re an interesting (albeit creepy) fashion statement. 
Kate Knibbs
Former Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
Bluesky finally adds a feature many had been waiting for
A blue sky with clouds.

Bluesky has been making a lot of progress in recent months by simplifying the process to sign up while at the same time rolling out a steady stream of new features.

As part of those continuing efforts, the social media app has just announced that users can now send direct messages (DMs).

Read more
Reddit just achieved something for the first time in its 20-year history
The Reddit logo.

Reddit’s on a roll. The social media platform has just turned a profit for the first time in its 20-year history, and now boasts a record 97.2 million daily active users, marking a year-over-year increase of 47%. A few times during the quarter, the figure topped 100 million, which Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman said in a letter to shareholders had been a “long-standing milestone” for the site.

The company, which went public in March, announced the news in its third-quarter earnings results on Tuesday.

Read more
Worried about the TikTok ban? This is how it might look on your phone
TikTok splash screen on an Android phone.

The US Supreme Court has decided to uphold a law that would see TikTok banned in the country on January 19. Now, the platform has issued an official statement, confirming that it will indeed shut down unless it gets some emergency relief from the outgoing president.

“Unless the Biden Administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19,” said the company soon after the court’s verdict.
So, what does going dark mean?
So, far, there is no official statement on what exactly TikTok means by “going dark.” There is a lot of speculation out there on how exactly the app or website will look once TikTok shutters in the US.

Read more